Nutrition

Here at Persist we approach our lifestyle in a holistic way and understand that exercising, whilst is so important for our health and comes with many benefits, is not all it takes to complete a healthy lifestyle. There are many different elements that add up to complete a healthy lifestyle; one of the main ones being your nutrition.

Nutrition and eating aren’t supposed to be feared, seen as a challenge or even be seen in the same sentence as diets or restriction. Your nutrition, your food and the way you eat should be incredibly personalised to a way that makes you FEEL good.

When reaching certain goals, if that is something that you do or have set for yourself, the nutrition aspect shouldn’t be seen as the overwhelming aspect of your goal.

For example; if you are wanting to lose weight, your focus would be on calories in vs calories out, which, put simply, means you need to expend more energy than you eat in calories. Of course, we encourage you eat as many whole foods as you can to make up your calories due to them being better for your overall health. But we would never encourage you to restrict a food group (unless advised for other health reasons) as this is not sustainable and can, a lot of the time, result in binge eating that food group or specific food. It is all about the 80:20 approach. Protein is arguably the most important food group as it fills you up for the longest, resulting in less snacking and feeling like you need to eat all the time, or “overeat”. We recommend trying to add a source of protein into every meal.

The same goal for losing weight applies to maintaining the weight you’re at. This would require working out what your “maintenance” calories are, where your body weight doesn’t change, and sticking to that. Again, for gaining muscle, it is recommended to go into a calorie surplus, where you are eating above your maintenance to encourage muscle gain.

As we mentioned, whilst we certainly encourage regular exercise, relying on simply exercising to achieve whatever goal it is you have, will make reaching that goal a lot harder to achieve. Take some tie to learn about the simple concept of nutrition and understand that these 2 things go hand and hand with each other, the nutrition being a really important aspect in reaching your goals.

We really want to drop the idea that nutrition is scary or overwhelming or the “hard” part of your goals / lifestyle, it really is a simple concept once explained well and understood.

If you are wanting a personalized nutrition plan to assist you with your goals, get in touch with our coaches and our nutritionist to create a plan for you.

Em